RESEARCH ZEALAND NEW GeogmDher 60 12) 2004: 40

‘Limited Employment Areas’: Striating the Spaces of Unemployment in New

Zealand

MATTHEW HENRY

This paper examines the recent policy announced by the Minister of Social Development that identifies a series of ‘Limited Employment Areas’ within which access to the unemployment benefit would be restricted. Drawing on Deleuze’s ideas of striation and modulation the paper explores the intersection of governance, space, and risk that seems to be combined in the policy. The paper concludes by reflecting on the deployment of risk based on ontological claims about the spatiality of unemployment. In seeking to shape the decisions of benefit seekers, there seems to be an emerging mosaic of welfare provision as a direct consequence of governmental intent, rather than as a failure of governmental ability.

Matthew Henry is a Lecturer in the Geography Programme a t Massey University, Palmerston North.

M.G.Henry@massey.ac.nz

Introduction

In New Zealand in March 2004 the Labour Government’s Minister for Social Development and Employment, Steve Maharey announced that access to the unemployment benefit would be cut if individuals decided to move to areas that had been identified by Work and Income as offering little prospect for employment. Accompanying the announcement was a schedule of almost 259 small, mainly rural centres identified as ‘Limited Employment Areas’ (LEAS) covered by new policy (Ministry of Social Development (MSD), 2004a). In signalling the policy the Minister argued that its purpose was to, “encourage people to seek work in locations where there are good work opportunities, discourage people from moving to locations where there are few or no opportunities, and ensure that local people already seeking work are not further disadvantaged by having other job seekers move to that area” (Office of the Clerk, 2004a: unpaged). Supporting the Minister, Work and Income National Commissioner, Ray Smith noted that under this policy, “unemployment beneficiaries would fail their work test obligations if they moved to towns named on the ‘alert list’ and could not commute outside the area to a job” (quoted in Bell, 2004: 1).

Immediate reaction to the policy announcement varied. In Parliament, Muriel Newman (ACT) asked why the unemployment benefit would only be cut for those moving to one of the identified areas, while those persons unemployed already living in the identified areas would ‘still retain their entitlement. Judith Collins (National) questioned the ability of Work and Income to actually implement the policy, whilst Sue Bradford (Green) queried both the broad brush nature of the policy change in a field meant to be characterised by case-by-case decision making, and the economic implications of listing areas as low employment regions (Office of the Clerk, 2004a). Reaction outside of Parliament also varied. Beneficiary advocate, Stephen Ruth argued that the policy, if implemented in the manner described by the Minister, would be unlawful (Bell, 2004). Elsewhere mayors in the targeted areas variously disputed the need for the programme, and the placement of areas under their jurisdiction on the list (Berry, 2004). What was agreed on, however, was that the policy would only affect a very small

proportion of the approximately 75,000 registered unemployed (MSD, 2004c), and that the amount of money saved would be quite limited (Berry, 2004; MSD, 2004a).

What, then, can we make of this policy change, given that by most accounts (with the exception of those directly affected -beneficiaries) its impact could be quite limited? This paper argues that regardless of the putatively limited ambit of this particular policy, it is a policy that has interesting implications in interpreting the changing ways in which space is produced and used by state agencies. To this end the paper begins by examining the intersection of movement, governance and space, drawing primarily on ideas from Deleuze, before shifting to link these ideas about the production and governance of space with the changing management of unemployment in New Zealand. Here the focus is on the recasting of the relationship between Work and Income and benefit seekers, and in particular the utilisation of risk as a governmental technique. In undertaking this task the paper is not intended to provide an empirically detailed examination of the intersection of welfare policy and space, but rather it provides a much more limited account of one policy tool (LEAS) as a means of calling our attention to broader issues of risk, governance, and space. To achieve this goal the paper relies upon a critical reading of published accounts of the LEAS policy from both within and outside government, and consequently cannot claim to uncover the effects of the policy, but only to interpret its articulated intent. In undertaking this process of interpretation we should remember that while the language of government may be redolent with certitude as to its ability to translate knowledge, and programme into order, the history of governing suggests that the process of translation is better captured through the idea of the contingency of ordering (Law, 1994).

Concerning territory and movement

Recently, Peck (2003) has argued that there has been an efflorescence of work in geography concerned with tracking and explaining the profound changes in economic and social governance that have marked many countries over the past two decades. In recognising the importance of this work Peck (2003: 222) makes the point that there is, however, a developing need, “to move beyond ‘thick descriptions’ of state restructuring, policy reforms and new forms of governance to ask what it is that the state is actually doing -why, where and with what political, social and economic implications”. It is with this call in mind that I seek to understand the ‘why’, and intent, of the LEAS policy. I begin this process, then, by considering two linked concepts from Deleuze that offer insights into the changing relationship between state agencies and the regimes of governance associated with their simultaneous concerns with territory and the conduct of dispersed individuals.

Deleuze’s work offers us a great many paths of exploration (see Patton, 1996), but for the purposes of this paper we will limit ourselves to two, entangled notions-striatation and modulation. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue that the process of governing, of seeking to order individuals and

territory, is marked by ongoing processes of assemblage. Assemblage in this context refers to the bringing together of heterogeneous objects into unities that have no necessary coherence other than the fact that they work. For Powell (2000) such processes of pragmatic assemblage lie at the heart of the ‘third way’ approach adopted in Britain, and by extension New Zealand under their respective Labour governments. More broadly, we can, however, argue that acts of assemblage are integral features of governance above and beyond any specific national, or party context (Dean, 1996; Rose, 1996a). The assemblage of governmental programmes intimately involves an attention to the production, and differentiation of space, as a both a means and consequence of governing (Foucault, 2001; Peck and Tickell, 2002; Rose, 199613). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use the word ‘striate’ to describe the intersection of assemblage and space because it is through the ability to break up and differentiate flows of people, information, money and objects that governmental agents are able to produce spaces of comparison and control, and hence spaces of ordering (on this point see Donaldson and Wood, 2004).

The connotations of the word ‘striate’ have important implications for the way in which Deleuze and Guattari conceive of the activity of governing. The noun ‘stria’ is defined as, ‘‘a slight furrow or ridge on surface” (OED, 1985: 745). The emphasis here is on the notion of slight insofar as it marks a point of difference, but not a categorical or impassable line. The implications of this distinction can be seen in Deleuze’s (1992) extension of these ideas. Here Deleuze (1992) argues for the necessity of moving beyond an analysis of disciplinary power (see Foucault, 1977). While this analysis provides a great tool with which to understand the power relations found within environments of enclosure -those institutions marked by the definition of the impassable such as prisons- such enclosures no longer seem to be the crux of ordering projects in the contemporary world (also see Hannah, 1997a). Rather the modern world seems to be marked by the dispersal of ordering projects, and so as to understand this dispersal Deleuze suggests that we trace a shift from the practice of disciplinary enclosure to a situation marked by the proliferation, and practices of modulated control. Thus, as this is translated into the regimes of governmental practice, “Enclosures are moulds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a selfdeforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other” (Deleuze, 1992: 4). Here Deleuze is offering us a contrast between a system of fixed differences, and a system of endlessly modifiable, and adaptable controls.

We do need to consider a couple of caveats. First, the suggestion that we need to shift beyond the analysis of disciplinary power is based on the reduction of Foucault’s (1977) disciplinary formulation to an architectural problematic. Whilst Foucault sited disciplinary power in certain paradigmatic spaces, the broader point was that the logic of disciplinary power -classification- was gradually being dispersed throughout society (Donaldson and Wood, 2004). Here, then, there does not seem to be quite the distinction that Deleuze draws. Second, in thinking about Deleuze’s notion of modulation we should be wary of the

RESEARCH ZEALAND NEW GeogmDher 60 [21 2004: 42

seeming timelessness that characterises it, insofar as i t points to a fantasy of instantaneous adaptation, a position often associated with the work of Paul Virilio (see Armitage, 1999; Virilio, 2001), and the concomitant visions of control problematised by Hannah (1997b) in his discussion of ‘cycles of control’. Here again the point is that we should not be seduced by the certainty of order, but rather need to constantly extend a scepticism as to its claims. However, given these caveats what is suggestive about Deleuze’s notions of striation and modulation is that collectively they point to governance as being marked by subtle, and slight, differentiations of space, and the creation of such differences as being necessary for the work of states in their ordering projects. Thus, whilst we may speak of the crushing weight of the forces of homogeneity (here we might think of the notion of globalisation), the practice of governing seems crisscrossed by the need to constantly produce individual differences (Diamondberg 1998; Foucault, 1977; Scott, 1998).

These ideas can be further situated, and expanded, through reference to the developing body of work that builds on Foucault’s (1991) later, rather sketchy outline of governmental power (for good overviews see Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999), and which ironically dovetails with Deleuze’s concern with striation and modulation as strategies of ordering. In discussing the governmental state Foucault (1991) distinguishes two broad assemblages of spatial strategies, each we might argue marked by differing means of striation and modulation. First, he identified the ongoing delineation of the territory over which the governmental programmes of the state operate, and which increasingly centred during the late-19th and the early-20th centuries on the solidification of the administrative border of the nation- state in a world of nation-states. Second, and concomitant with the processes of defining the borders of the governmental state, he discussed a concern with ordering the internal spaces of the nation-state to support, and maintain, the emergent rhythms of ‘the national population’ and ‘the national economy’.

The point at which this governmental concern with territory and individual conduct intersects can be readily grasped where the state displays an interest in shaping the movement of its citizens. Weberian-inflected definitions of the state have emphasised the state’s monopolisation of legitimate violence as the basis of its power, but as Torpey (1998; 2000) argues the state has also increasingly claimed a likewise monopolisation of the legitimate means of movement. In order to do this Torpey, like both Deleuze and Foucault, maintains that the power of the modern state lies in its ability to deploy an administrative apparatus (on this point see Dandeker, 1990) in order to divide up its territory with varying degrees of subtlety with the intent of shaping, or reshaping, the flows of people, information, money, or objects as they cross such striations. In this sense striations can be seen not only as lines of differentiation, but perhaps more importantly as providing points of contact where individuals can be embraced in the ordering projects of the state (Hannah, 1993). For Torpey (1998) this concern with movement, and the concomitant display of the state’s administrative power to define the possibilities of movement

has been most explicitly articulated in the ongoing delineation and hardening of the borders between states. In charting the preeminence of the international border as the point of interest in the movement of individuals, Torpey (2000) makes the associated argument that there has been a corresponding disappearance of internal movement controls within the territories of nationstates: Indeed, this narrative of emergence and linked decline provides, for Torpey, one means of distinguishing authoritarian forms of governance from more liberal regimes of governance.

However, we need to be cautious. In particular, we can argue that the distinction between authoritarian and liberal modalities of government that is evident in Torpey’s discussion of internal movement controls is much more indistinct than we might hope (Gordon, 2001). Moreover the practice of liberal government itself contains significant moments of authoritarian control (Dean, 2002), a point that resonates with the intent of the announced L E A policy. Here, then, we might simply point to the continuing importance of movement restrictions in the practice of liberal government, limits that can be seen not only in the growth in incarceration rates that seem to be a feature of liberal democracies, but also more mundanely in the day-to- day necessity of using ID cards, and swipe cards, as means of accessing particular spaces (Lyon, 2002; 2003).

To further understand the spatiality of such governmental strategies, it is useful to consider what Valverde (1996) calls the ‘geographicalisation of space’. The context of Valverde’s discussion is the intersection of space and governance within the practice of liberal governmentality. As a practical rationality of rule, Valverde argues that liberalism is faced with a problem insofar as it purports to situate individuals under a common, formal equality whilst also operating through diverse sets of mechanisms that rely upon processes of ongoing individualisation, and the articulation of ontological claims about the differential capabilities of individuals. As a means of avoiding these problems, in shaping its activity, “Liberal governance relies on certain common-sense assumptions about spatially based difference” (Valverde, 1996: 368). Thus, it is assumed that certain spaces are naturally suited to particular regimes of ordering, and that it would defy common-sense to subject different spaces to the same regime of ordering. For example, the university and the primary school are held to be naturally different educative spaces; inner-city streets are naturally different from suburban streets; spaces of civil life are cacegorically different from the spaces of the state; and spaces with different employment characteristics require different regimes of welfare governance. Such strategies resonate with Blomley’s (1994) point that whilst legal discourses operate through reference to putatively timeless principles, they simultaneously enable, and indeed rely upon, the creation of intricate mosaics of ordering. To this end the intent that Valverde highlights can be seen in the light of Deleuze’s practices of striation insofar as they both speak to the ongoing production, and differentiation of space as a necessary element in the practice of government. What Valverde adds is the idea that such processes of spatial differentiation are integral practices of liberal forms of

RESEARCH ZEAE! GeograDber,,212m443 government, liberal in this sense referring to those forms of government that seek to act indirectly on individual citizens, through the direct production of different spaces of governance. It is this link between indirect and direct governance, and its intersection with the management of unemployment, to which this paper now turns.

Managing unemployment

The previous section sought to frame the LEAS policy adumbrated in the introduction within a wider understanding of the intersection of space and governance, using two notions from the work of Deleuze. In constructing this understanding the notion of striation was utilised as a way of representing the spatial strategies whereby space is subtly divided up as a means of enabling the ordering work of the state, whilst the idea of modulation speaks to the processes of shaping access between the spaces defined by striation. It is these contours of modulation, examined through the emerging regimes of governance associated with the changing management of unemployment in New Zealand during the last decade that is the focus of this section.

The past two decades have seen a profound shift in the intent, and practice, of welfare in the world’s liberal democracies. Rose (2000: 323) captures part of this shift when he writes that the recasting of the state’s role has been conducted in concert with an argument which maintains that national governments should no longer be the final guarantor of security, but rather, “instead the state should be a partner, animator and facilitator for a wide variety of independent agents and powers, and should exercise only limited powers of its own, steering and regulating rather than rowing and providing.” Conversely, if the destructive face of nediberal governance is couched in terms of the rollback of the social welfare state, then Peck (2003) suggests that we also need to consider the productive potential of such modalities of rule. More specifically, Peck (2003: 226) points out that the typical programme of neo-liberal restructuring has never simply been about the production of a deregulationist state, but rather has, “demonstrated a capacity to morph into a variety of institutional forms, to insinuate itself into, and graft itself onto, a range of different institutional settlements”. In particular, whilst much has been made of the institutional change associated with n e e liberal governance, we also need to recognise that such change has gone hand in hand with an effort to proscribe an ethical basis for individual self-fashioning (Hunt, 1999; Rose, 2000). This point supports the contention made by Brenner and Theodore (2002) that neo-liberal restructuring is a multiscaler exercise working through a concern with individual conduct and institutional change in forms that do not necessarily suppose a linear, hierarchical relationship of scale. It is in this context of adaptability, of ongoing modulation, that we can begin to understand the changing management regime of unemployment as a governmental moment linking together individuals, institutions, and space.

The changing world of work has been linked to the seemingly pervasive spread of individual uncertainty and

insecurity (Bauman, 2001; Mangan, 2000). Drawing on the work of the Labour Market Dynamics Research Programme, McLaren (2004) argues that the experience in New Zealand has similarly seen the emergence of discourses of anxiety attached to the field of employment. Such an emergence may well be seen as a particularly modern neurosis, but perhaps also as a politically produced point of intervention. In this context we can argue that the encouragement of ongoing self-fashioning as a means of forestalling the anxiety of (un)employment encompasses two processes: one of which encourages individuals to mitigate the risk of becoming unemployed; and another which embraces the unemployed more directly and calls for them to be active agents in their own unemployment.

O n the first point we can begin by suggesting that security be reoriented to refer not simply the maintenance of a job, but rather the ability to find another job. Thus, then, individuals have been increasingly asked to take responsibility for their own security; their own future employability; and hence their ability to pass over the striation of joblessness. The shifting intersection of uncertainty and responsibility in employment can be linked to what O’Malley (1996; 2000: 465) describes as the reactivation of an enterprising prudentialism whereby individuals are enjoined to, ”practise and sustain their autonomy by assembling information, materials and practices together into a personalised strategy that identifies and minimises their exposure to harm”. Thus, since we are no longer promised the security of lifetime careers, we are enjoined to reduce, but not eliminate, the risk of future unemployment by assembling our own portfolio of risk management strategies -paradigmatically seen in calls for life-long training- that should enable us to navigate the world of mobile, discontinuous, and improvisational careers (Inkson, 2004).

If we can see the world of employment being modulated by the emergence of an enterprising prudentialism, then this selfsame prudentialism has also been extended into the management of unemployment. Such concerns can be seen, for example, as flagged in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) (1990) identification of the desirability of an ‘active society’ whereby society would be characterised by dynamic measures designed to shift individuals into work, rather than the passive distribution of welfare. In a New Zealand context, McClure (1998) identifies distinct strands in unemployment policy that emerged during the 1990s in an effort to translate the OECD’s call for an ‘active society’ into governmental practice (also see Mare, 2002). One approach was to actively try and reduce the incentives for individuals to remain within the welfare system. Thus, during the early 1990s, for example, there was a significant tightening of the eligibility criteria for access to both basic and supplementary benefits.

In actuality, argues McClure (1998) the effect was to dramatically worsen the living standards of those living on benefits, whilst in the process compromising their abiliq to move outside the welfare system, by simultaneously providing an incentive for people, if they could, to shift into different benefit regimes that paid more. A second approach was more specifically focused on trying to shift people into the

workforce. During the early 1990s the Department of Social Welfare researched various means of exacting these shifts through such methods as work-testing, cash incentives, and work schemes. Again, however, significant practical problems emerged from these efforts including: skill miss-matches; and increasing competition for those jobs that did exist, particularly as rising numbers of women entered, or re- entered, the workforce (McClure, 1998). Moreover, despite the cuts in benefit levels, given the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 and the draconian rules clawing back any income people might earn in excess of their benefit, there was still little incentive for people to rejoin the workforce.

Given these practical issues, then, a more active approach to managing unemployment was initially signalled in Shipley (1991 et al.), and more forcefully advocated by the Prime Ministerial Task Force on Employment (1994). A significant part of this process was the more explicit articulation, and practice, of a contractual relationship between the state’s welfare agencies and those people seeking benefits focused on creating an environment based on a series of reciprocal obligations. Here the Task Force (1994: 4) noted that, “The income support system should encourage people to take up employment, education, or training .... Where suitable jobs or programme places are available, unemployed job seekers should be expected to take advantage of them. Individual’s rights should be balanced by their responsibilities”. In this call we can identify a significant degree of continuity in the understanding of the management of unemployment articulated above, and the understanding of unemployment articulated in support of the LEAS policy (see McKenzie, 1997; Ministry of Social Policy, 1999; MSD, 2002; Preston, 1997). Thus, for example the MSDs (2002: Part 2, Chapter 1: .9-10) briefing after the 2002 general election noted that, “Active social assistance also involves individuals, and the Ministry, clearly understanding their mutual responsibilities and obligations .... Opportunities offered and negotiated with the person should be taken up. This should be backed up with a transparent sanctions regime that emphasises clear expectations for individuals receiving assistance. Here, then, whilst there have been a variety of governments during the last decade there has been a distinct continuity of belief about the correct management of unemployment.

The ongoing entanglement of benefit seeking individuals within this contractual understanding of welfare can be seen in the intent of the ‘job seeker agreement’. This agreement is a statutory document ‘negotiated’ between ‘clients’ and Work and Income, which is intended to explicitly outline each party’s reciprocal obligations (MSD 2004b). While the language of the agreement is framed through the neo-liberal nostrums of choice, and supposes an equality of status, it is made clear that failing to sign an agreement that has been drawn up is not an option. Within this agreement, which provides an overarching contractual framework, there sits a further series of obligations around work testing (McKenzie, 1997). It is through the work test that the policy relating to LEAS (and other requirements including drug testing) enters the job seeker agreement. Under questioning in Parliament, the Associate Minister

for Social Development and Employment made the link between the obligations contained in the work test and the LEAs policy quite clear where he stated that, “One of the tests for the unemployment benefit is that people are to be ready, willing, and be able to take on work. So people who worked but move from an area where there are employment opportunities to places where there are none have failed the test” (Office of the Clerk, 2004b: unpaged).

As an ordering tool the work test serves a number of purposes. First, it provides an explicit, and formal, moment of contact between Work and Income and benefit seekers that enables the individualisation of the latter, and the concomitant casting of a net of visibility over them which enables their distribution around a communicated norm. Second, in linking access to the unemployment benefit to successfully passing the work test in the manner outlined above, the work test is positioned as a technique of modulation. Through this positioning the effort can be made to shape the conduct of the benefit seeker to reduce the risk of continued unemployment through encouraging a process of active self-fashioning backed up by the threat of sanctions. Here then in a microcosm we can discern the lurking authoritarianism of neo-liberal welfare provision that seeks to enable a process of individual self-fashioning, and where that fashioning deviates to enforce a disciplinary fashioning. In these processes of modulation -classification, articulation, and fashioning- we can see the work test as a point of control.

There is continuity between calls for individuals to take responsibility in managing the risks associated with their own employability, and the reorganisation of the management of unemployment. Focusing on the latter this concern has been manifested by the modulation of unemployment policy with the explicit intent of transforming the putatively passive welfare recipient into an active jobseeker able to shift themselves across the striation of joblessness. Building on this point the following section examines the intersection of governance, the prudential subject, and the LEAS spatiality.

Modulating space

The management of unemployment does not take place on the isotropic plane of economists, but rather, like other programmes of governance, involves the ongoing production, and the mobilisation of space and governance, in the fashioning of individual conduct. This final section attempts to draw these connections together in the specific context of the LEA policy, beginning with examining the claims about the landscape of unemployment.

The LEAS policy simultaneously relies upon, and makes, a series of ontological claims about the landscape of employment, claims which in turn provide the justification for striating spaces, and modulating access to those spaces. Here, claims about employment do not simply reflect some geographical reality, but rather are in some way constitutive of that reality, an issue touched on by various commentators who suggest that the labelling of certain areas as ‘no-go zones’ might have the effect of further reducing employment

opportunities in those areas. In making these claims we can reflect on the Ministry of Economic Development, which to support their regional development strategy, defines a region as, “a geographical concentration of communities with similar economic, social and environmental characteristics and objectives” (Office of the Minister for Industry and Regional Development, 2000: 3). The point here is that regions do not necessarily align with, for example, the administrative boundaries of local bodies, but rather are assembled from collections of varied knowledges, and bound together by acts of interpretive continuity, and administrative practice.

In the context of the L E A policy it is knowledge about unemployment conditions that provide the means of striating particular areas. Such knowledge was assembled from an engagement between Work and Income managers and local mayors and focused on criteria that included: numbers of people already looking for work, the number of job placements already made, and the availability of transport (Minister for Social Development and Employment quoted in MSD, 2004a; Office of the Clerk, 2004a). Much of the immediate public debate over the policy centred on the inadequacies of the consultation process, rather than the claims being made about the areas identified. Thus, for example, the Chair of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs, Christchurch City Council Mayor Garry Moore argued that, “We were not part of those making decisions. We were told. As a taskforce we were not engaged in this” (quoted in Jobs Research Trust, 2004: 2). Similarly, Thames Coromandel District Council Mayor Chris Lux noted that the list of scheduled LEAs was meant to come back to mayors for comment, but that, “that hasn’t happened” (quoted in Jobs Research Trust, 2004: 2) . On another tack Dunedin City Council Mayor Sukhi Turner (also Deputy Chair of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs) expressed concern that the policy would stigmatise areas and make it harder for them to attract business (Jobs Research Trust, 2004). The criticism articulated by Sukhi Turner, and others, may have questioned the consequences of the identification of LEAS but did not question the activity of striation, and the knowledges assembled to enable this process.

If the LEAs policy seeks to striate space according to certain knowledge claims about employment conditions, then it also relies on claims about the correct management of unemployment as a means of modulating access to the identified spaces. In particular the policy draws on the constitution of the unemployed as active jobseekers whose conduct is shaped by ongoing calculations of risk and self interest. Self interest in this case is couched in terms of maintaining access to the unemployment benefit vis-a-vis the potential for employment and the cost of living in better job markets such as in Auckland. Thus, by reshaping access to benefits for the unemployed by using knowledge about employment conditions to striate space, the intent is to modulate the residential choices of the unemployed, and in doing so reconnect them to labour markets in areas of employment opportunity. In this attempt we can see the concern, identified by Foucault (1991), of the practice of government power with the maintenance of the good

rhythm of realms of activity, in this case employment, outside the direct influence of the state.

In this attempt to work through the calculating self- interest of jobseekers we can argue that the LEAS policy can be interpreted as an example of liberal rule. Yet if the intent of liberal rule is to work indirectly, then we should not forget there are limits to this intent, and where these limits are broached there emerges what Dean (2002) describes as an ‘authoritarian liberalism’ that seeks to act much more directly on individuals. The management of unemployment tip toes along the border between indirect and direct means of governance. This can be glimpsed if we consider the ways in which the conduct of the active jobseeker is modulated by contact with state agents such as Work and Income. For one, and to borrow an idea from Latour (1987), Work and Income emerges as a spatially dispersed ‘centre of calculation’ that brings into alignment flows of information and the political rationalities of welfare provision, whilst translating those into governmental programmes. Within these centres case managers represent key agents in the calculation and management of risk. A process of calculation centred on the administration of the jobseeker agreement and which encompasses the identification of spaces of unemployment risk. Calculations of risk and classification of individuals in this sense are moralised so as to be able to modulate between the deserving and undeserving unemployed (Baker, 2000). This distinction can be seen in the comment made by the Associate Minister for Social Development and Employment that, “What we are saying to people is that if they are living in an area where there are job prospects and decide to move to an area where there are no job prospects, then this is a lifestyle choice and the Government, via the taxpayer, should not fund it” (quoted in Office of the Clerk, 2004b: unpaged).

In all this we might pause to consider the extent to which the seemingly simple policy announcement of LEAs requires the considerable deployment of the state’s infrastructural powers insofar as it needs, for example, both large scale aggregate data on employment broken down regionally, alongside a means of individualising benefit seekers, linked to the desire to maintain an interested gaze upon their movements. From these the processes of making space involves the determination of spaces of joblessness, and the mapping of that determination into the field of possibilities set before those seeking to draw on the unemployment benefit. Out of this we can see emerging a complex mosaic of benefit entitlement encompassing calculations of risk from different agents within which spaces become sites for the application of a modulated series of practices designed to shape the exercise of individual conduct in relation to employment

Conclusion

The LEAs policy provides a seemingly common-sense response to the problem of long-term unemployment by seeking to limit the movement of those receiving, or seeking, benefits to areas where employment has been identified as limited. Yet, on closer examination, the policy resonates with wider issues relating to the practice of

RESEARCH ZEALAND NEW GeograDher 60 [21 2004: 46

government, and the creation, and use of space. The paper has argued that the LEAS policy represents part of a continuing interest in shaping the movement of individuals within the space of the nationstate. To this end the paper highlighted the importance of regulating movement in the ordering work of the state. But, as was suggested, the policy outlined here problematised the conceptualisation of disappearance charted by Torpey. Rather, drawing on the work of Deleuze, the policy represents a continuing form of modulation whereby an individual’s access to the unemployment benefit is shaped by ongoing calculations as

to the potential risk of unemployment stemming from their residential decisions. Thinking more broadly, we might speculate that the introduction of such a policy marks the overt deployment of spatial strategies orientated around striating the internal spaces of the nation-state, and in modulating access by individuals to different spaces according to calculations of risk. Here, then, the putative homogeneity of the national polity and its territorialisations becomes increasingly fragmented, not ironically from the failure of government, but rather as an explicit policy of governing.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who commented on an earlier draft of this paper, and those participants who commented on a version of this paper presented as part of the Massey University, Geography Seminar Series.

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